Alice Oswald has been named as the winner of the inaugural Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.
This new Award, run by the Poetry Society and founded by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, is awarded to the UK poet, working in any form, judged to have made the most exciting contribution to poetry in the past twelve months.

Judges Jo Shapcott, Tim Supple and Imtiaz Dharker awarded Oswald the £5,000 prize for her collection Weeds and Wildflowers (published Faber and Faber). Oswald offers a magical meeting of the visionary and the darkly beautiful, in poems that invent unsettling characters, inspired by plants’ names which explore our “wild or wayside selves”. The book shuffles her poems through with edgy botanical etchings by Jessica Greenman.

Explaining the judges’ choice, Jo Shapcott said:
These poems represent fragility, test the nature of our relationship with the environment and, by implication, our responsibility to it. Etchings by Jessica Greenman join in the field of the book and make, as Oswald hopes will be the case, an effect “like shuffling cards”. This is exactly what happens when you read the book: the visual images twine through the pages against the light-filled and often transcendent flower poems which shift their point of view constantly. Not a conventional poetry book: Weeds and Wild Flowers crosses artistic boundaries and age boundaries and is unsettling and unsettled in every good way.